Liège - Bastogne - Liège, 1980

What makes an "exploit?" A great
event, certainly, is needed, to ensure a proper setting, or else
(like Anquetil's incredible double), a
sequence of victories in great events - Indurain's five consecutive
Tour victories would fit this definition. A great race will
automatically bring along a quality field, from which the winner
will certainly have to be a rider of the greatest quality. But on
top of those criteria, something else is needed, a level of victory
that can brook no doubt about the quality of the winner. Bernard Hinault's victory in
the 1980 Liège - Bastogne -
Liège fits all the criteria. Merckx, Kelly, Van Looy
notwithstanding, this was perhaps the most crushing performance in
a classic in the modern era of the sport.

"La Doyenne", as it is known,
is certainly a great event, the oldest surviving classic. Lining up
at the start line on 20 April 1980 were the cream of the sport's
top riders: as well as Hinault, Guiseppe Sarroni - winner of the
Flèche Wallone three days previously, where Hinault had been
third - was on the line, along with Kuiper, Peeters,
Duclos-Lasalle, De Wolf, Baronchelli, Gavazzi, Knudsen, Nilsson,
Pollentier and Willems - class riders, all of them. Within an hour,
most had retired; by the first feeding station over one hundred
riders had departed for an early bath.

The reason, as is often the case in
the Ardennes, was atrocious weather - the riders had woken up to a
blizzard, conditions so severe that many commentators considered
them to be the worst ever seen for the Ardennes Classics. Hinault
never liked the cold at the best of times, but stuck with the race,
along with his only remaining team-mate, Maurice Le Guilloux.
Indeed, it was Le Guilloux who managed to persuade Hinault to keep
going at least as far as the feeding station in Bastogne, with 140
kilometres still left to race.

Up to this stage in the race, Hinault
hadn't really even bothered to follow what had been happening;
instead, he had just ridden with his hand in front of his face to
deflect the snow. Out in front, Rudy Pévenage led on
his own. Hinault was in a small bunch, 2' 15" down by the Stockeu
wall, now with only 80km left to race. On the Stockeu, Hinault
moved clear - not so much an attack, more just force of character.
On the next climb, Pévenage was caught, and as
unceromoniously dropped. From here on in, Hinault just rode
steadily to the finish, picking his way carefully over the frozen
roads. "I kept telling myself that the riders behind must be in the
same state and if they could stand it, so could I", he was to write
later in his autobiography.

By the finish, the result behind was
carnage. Hinault won alone; it was to be more than nine minutes
before Hennie Kuiper came in
second - just imagine, Hinault had taken 12 minutes back in just 80
kilometres! The remainder of the riders came in in dribs and drabs;
the last of just twenty one of them nearly half an hour down. It
was victory in the grandest manner possible: destruction of a
quality field by a rider incomparably stronger than any other rider
that day.

Hinault's bath was well-deserved that
day, and indeed his team-mates had prepared one for him, as they
watched the drama unfold on television. Alas, for Hinault, he could
not take it until it had cooled right down, such was his state of
cold. It took three weeks before his index and middle fingers
recovered, and ever after, he was always amongst the first in the
peloton to don gloves in cold weather. Such is the price for
claiming one of the great classics victories of all time; an
exploit in the truest sense!